How to Create an Oddly-shaped Surreal House

In this photo-manipulation tutorial, we will learn how to create an oddly-shaped, surreal-inspired, stone house. We will learn how to blend several stock images together to create a pseudo long exposure image of a surreal house at the edge of the dock. We will learn how to create realistic reflections on water and also, enhance the light and shadows of the stock images to create a seamless image.

Step 1: Create a Photoshop Image File

Now, let’s start by creating a new image file, go to the Menu bar and click File > New, and then input the following values on their respective fields:

Width: 3000px

Height: 3000px

Resolution: 300pixels/inch

Color Mode: RGB Color; 8 bit

Background Contents: Transparent

Step 2: Create the Background

In this step, we will be creating the sky of our image. To start, open “Stock Field” by digital amphetamine. Next activate the Rectangular Marquee Tool by pressing M on your keyboard.

Once activated, create a selection area around the sky as shown below:

Next, activate the Move tool (V) and drag the selected area by left-clicking on it and dragging it to the canvas.

Position the selected area as shown on the image below:

Now, let’s rename this layer to “sky 1″. To rename a layer, simply double-click on the words: “layer 1″ (you can find that on the layer window) to prompt a text box to appear. Once that appears, you may now rename the layer. See image below:

Next, activate the Transform tool (Ctrl/Cmd + T) and resize the image as shown on the image below:

Now, activate the Transform tool (Ctrl/Cmd + T) and resize the image by following the instructions shown below:

The result of that should be like this:

Next, we will add another sky layer to give make the sky more dramatic. To start, open “Sky 17″ by sacral stock. Once open, activate the Move tool (V) and drag this to our canvas, make sure to put this layer above the “sky 1″ layer; to do that, simply left-click the new layer and drag it above the “sky 1″ layer.

Next, we will need to erase some parts of “sky 2″ to make it blend with “sky 1″, so activate the Eraser tool (E) and input the following:

Brush size: 2200px

Hardness: 0%

Opacity: 100%

Flow: 100%

Now, erase as shown below:

After that, change “sky 2″‘s layer opacity to 80% to make it blend well with “sky 1″.

To change the Layer opacity, go to the Layer window and then change 100% to 80%.

Now, let’s Merge the sky layers; to Merge them, simply click on both layers and then right click on one of them and then on the contextual menu, click on “Merge Layers”.

Now that both of these layers are merged, we will now make them move similar to skies from a long exposure image; to do that, click on the newly merged layer and then go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and then input the following:

Angle: 0

Distance: 200pixels

The result should be similar to this:

Step 3: Create the Dock

In this step, we will add the huge body of water as well as the dock. To start, let’s open “floating dock” by archistock. Once open, activate the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) and create a selection area around the dock.

Once you’ve created the selection area, activate the Move tool (V) and drag it to our canvas. Put this new layer above the merged sky layer. Name this new layer to “dock”.

Position the layer as shown on the image below:

Activate the Transform tool (Ctrl/Cmd + T) and then resize the dock as shown below: